WASHINGTON — Salud Carbajal was 12, in his bedroom with his brother, when he heard a loud pop coming from another room.
His sister had killed herself with her father’s revolver.
“I got up and saw my sister on the ground with a pool of blood around her,” recalled Carbajal, now 57. “That trauma has been with me the rest of my life.”
Today the Democratic congressman from California is leading the effort to get Congress to pass “red flag” laws — measures that give family members, police, the courts and others powerful tools to take guns away from people who are a threat to themselves and others.
One approach, sponsored by Rep. Lucy McBath, D-Ga., would allow federal courts to issue such orders. Carbajal’s proposal is less ambitious but seen as more likely to pass a Congress reluctant to even tinker with gun laws, but which is newly motivated after mass killings of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and 10 people at a Buffalo grocery store.
His bill would establish a Justice Department grant program to encourage states to adopt extreme risk protection or gun violence restraining orders.
The orders, called gun violence restraining orders in California, permit family members, law enforcement officials and in some cases other parties to ask a court to bar someone known to them from having access to firearms if there’s strong evidence that person poses a threat to themselves or others.
Funding would also be available to train law enforcement and the courts in how to use such orders.
The House is expected to vote on the two approaches this week.
Guns and a suicide
Carbajal’s effort has its roots in his family’s tragedy. He was the youngest of seven, sharing that room with his brother at their home in tiny Bagdad, Arizona. Their father worked in a copper mine.
On the day his sister killed herself, she, Carbajal, and his brother were the only ones home.
There was a noise. “It sounded like a cross between a firecracker and an old chair, like a chair fell down and hit linoleum. I remember telling my brother that sounded like a gunshot.
“I remember vividly him saying ‘Shut up and go to bed,’” Carbajal said. Instead, he went to see what happened.
It’s questionable whether a red flag law would have stopped the suicide.
“No doubt she was distraught, depressed. Many in that case say a red flag could have helped,” he said of his sister, who was in her late 20s.
Soon afterwards, the copper mine closed and the family moved to Oxnard, where they lived in public housing. The horrors of gun violence were always close by.
“There I heard the sirens, the police, the reports there had been some kind of shooting or gun violence of some type, be it domestic, suicide, gang related or something else,” Carbajal said.
When he was older and became a Marine, he saw what assault weapons could do — and understood why there was no need for them in civilian life.
As a Santa Barbara County Supervisor in 2014, he dealt with the killing of six people near UC Santa Barbara.
Carbajal and gun control
Carbajal came to Congress in 2017, knowing that any major overhaul of gun laws was impossible. But he did find Republicans willing to talk about red flag laws.
He would explain how “every day there is violence in communities that doesn’t make the headlines. Let’s remember this is going on every day.”
Nineteen states, including California, already have “red flag” laws.
California allows family members, teachers, employers, co-workers and others in a household to get a Gun Violence Restraining Order from a judge. The order temporarily removes firearms and ammunition from someone the judge deems a threat to themselves or others.
The plans are given some chance of winning approval because similar efforts have been regarded as successful already — including in some Republican-leaning states.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., signed into law a similar measure when he was governor in 2018, the month after a gunman killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
The red flag laws, as well as other gun regulation measures, got strong support from Democrats last week when the House Judiciary Committee wrote gun control legislation.
Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., noted that an 18-year-old can legally buy an assault weapon. Both the Uvalde and Buffalo shooters were 18 years old.
“Somebody who is 18 years old, right after their birthday, goes and one of the first things they do is buy an assault weapon. That should be a red flag,” he said.
“Where is that person coming from? That is what they want on their 18th birthday?”
Many Republicans, though, insisted that more gun control laws are not the answers to curbing such violence. One answer, they said, is deterrence.
“If you walk into any bank in the country, you will see at least one armed guard, whose purpose is to protect our money with lethal force,” said Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Elk Grove.
“And yet at Uvalde and so many other school shootings, we were not willing to protect children with the same force we are willing to protect our money.”
Carbajal is well aware of the forces arguing against any sort of gun regulation.
But each small step could help. “Collectively, all these laws lend themselves to creating a framework that reduces gun violence. It limits people not in the right frame of mind who are dangers to others,” he said.
------
